The other week I finally got onto Facebook, the online social networking tool that's been reported on frequently of late as a forum for misguided teenage bullying and careless regard for personal boundaries.
I would not likely have signed up, but when I saw how many of my over-30 friends actually had a profile, I couldn't resist. I just LOVE finding out what makes people tick, and it turned out I was able to locate a whole whack of former colleagues with whom I'd lost touch. Above is the Face that greets my friends on my page(the only ones I've set up to see my profile info).
This week, I found a snag in Facebook's generally intuitive and bullet-proof navigation and user settings.
Since I'm just getting used to how my info displays, I've been adding and removing things from my profile. Take my birth year: I don't mind people knowing when my birthday is, but don't necessarily want all my Facebook friends - or those who want to be my friend - to know I'm pushing 40 (they might kick me out of the club!).
It's common to see where your Facebook friends have altered their profiles, too, as you will get a news feed about the change each time one of them makes it.
So, this week while fiddling, I removed not only my birth year but also my marital status. I'm figuring it's not relevant for these purposes - everyone on my Friends list knows I'm happily partnered, as evidenced by the pix of my daughter and husband available to Facebook friends.
But, when I changed my selection in the drop-down menu from "married" to blank, the newsfeed to my friends said I had changed my status from married - and next to the note was a broken-heart icon!!! So, even though I'd simply wanted the entire category to disappear, the system read and reported my change as though I had become un-married.
When I corrected the error a day later, a couple people jokingly wrote that I sure did work fast: divorced-then-remarried within a day!
Of course, it was the system's fault. It did not allow me to simply remove the mention of marital status and have that change recorded as such. Just goes to show how systems that automatically draw conclusions based on the information that's inputted are only as reliable as those who set them up; this one did not allow for the subtleties of how one might handle that particular chunk of her personal info.
It scares me to think of what happens to people who don't pay as much attention as I do (and I'm not nearly the savviest tech user around), when they choose what information they share, and with whom...
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